doug@escher.UUCP (Douglas J Freyburger) (08/13/85)
We have a mixture of DEC machines running DEC operating systems, and some VAXen running unix, so I go back and forth constantly. Some of my users have some trouble doing that. They are accustomed to the DEC supplied user interfaces to RT-11 and VMS. I'd like to find a shell to run under VAX unix (bsd4.2) that is remenicent of the TOPS-20 CLI. Does anyone know of one out there, especially public domain or very low price? Its features in order of importance would be: 1) Unambiguous command abreviation. Typing "dir" and "direct" and getting the same results is nice. I can go through the system directories and make links to them giving them mneumonic names. 2) Being able to call "sh" or "csh". Great programming languages to write scripts in. 3) Pipes and arrow redirection. Probably even back-quote command redirection. ---- Now the dreams start ---- 4) Escape and question mark expanding the command name out to ambiguity or completion or giving me the current list of choises. 5) Escape and question mark doing it for file names, too. 6) Escape and question mark knowing the switch names for system utilities. This would involve writing up some sort of database defining the command line formats for each program. User expandable, even? VMS has the CLD files for use with SET COMMAND, but I don't think something that extravagent is called for. 7) Recoding all of the utilities so their switch names are mneumonic, too. This is quite a "| dream", but while I was asking... 8) Case insensitivity. I'm sure there are plenty of ridiculous other features that might be nice to TOPS-20 migrators. This is the only one I could think of off-hand. (-)NX for bearing with me, Doug Doug Freyburger DOUG@JPL-VLSI, DOUG@JPL-ROBOTICS, JPL 171-235 ...escher!doug, doug@aerospace, Pasadena, CA 91109 etc. -- Doug Freyburger DOUG@JPL-VLSI, DOUG@JPL-ROBOTICS, JPL 171-235 ...escher!doug, doug@aerospace, Pasadena, CA 91109 etc.
root@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) (08/16/85)
There's something called the tcsh that I believe comes off of mit-prep (maybe someone else has more details.) It provides a lot of what you are asking for (command completion, an ESC-? facility), well, you can imagine, the 't' stands for 't'wenex I assume. I think a much better suggestion would be for you to run one of the unix shells on your VMS systems, I mean where do you think you're heading? (slight :-) Ok, who wants to start a pool for a date when the first person asks for a JCL simulator under UNIX? I mean, UNIX has nothing at all equivalent to DISP=(NEW,KEEP,DELETE)! (large :-) [I know, it's already been asked for, see 'man dd'] -Barry Shein, Boston University